People have converted their Big Mouth Billy Bass to use Alexa. Now people are augmenting their Big Mouth Billy Bass with ChatGPT AI. You can check out his github project here.
This guy gave his version an Arnold personality:
Drone warfare is very real as the conflict in Ukraine has shown the world. Cheap, re-purposed drone airplanes deliver bombs behind enemy lines and small copters are being used to deliver decisive and deadly grenades to entrenched positions. Hoog created this distopian instructional video that imagines how bad things could get and how to protect yourself from packs of rogue robots.
While this version is tongue-in-cheek, the reality is that swarms of cheap drones can absolutely overwhelm and kill larger, well-equipped enemy forces.
Real anti-drone weapons are already being developed
Don’t like hiking but want to get lots of instagram-ready shot to impress everyone? Want to try practicing your photography skills without hours of walking or waiting for lighting conditions?
Matt Newell used Unreal Engine 5 to create a photography-themed game in which you walk trails and then take photos – getting to experiment with all the different camera settings. It’s turned into a sleeper hit – all from a guy that said during an interview for the Unreal Engine blog, he admits he learned Unreal Engine from scratch by using resources from the UE website and engaging with the development community. To create his effects, he utilized UE5 distance fields, contact shadows, and virtual textures. He also utilized free Quixel’s megascans.
You can read how he used each of the techniques in his interview on the UE blog.
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Chernobyl’s destruction isn’t over. Besides being radioactive for 1000’s of years, now we deal with Russia crashing explosive drones into it. Can we all agree no matter how bad the war is going, nobody wants this kind of idiocy? B1M does great coverage of high profile buildings – and has a good article on this as well.
At 2am on 14 February 2025, a Russian drone struck the north-west corner of the Chernobyl containment roof. The explosion ripped through the outer containment and inner insulation layers, destroying insulation and exposing membranes to flame.
As the fire spread inside the roof’s cavity, firefighters faced conditions for which no manual had prepared them. Temperatures outside plunged to -16C. Water froze before it could seep down to smouldering insulation. For 17 days, hoses ran continuously, until finally, on 7 March, the blaze was declared out.
Weird History created this nearly 4 hour event by event documentary of all the things that happened in the 80’s.
NetbyMatt re-created the old school look and feel of The Weather Channel cable channel. You can input your own location and enjoy it with some of the original music.
João Paulo Gonçalves creates art by precisely cutting and placing blocks to produce the shadow of an entirely different image when illuminated from the center using a reflector bulb.
dango.niko shows off her Acco MU02 keyboard with rosewood switches and Awekeys Viking metal keycaps. The resulting thocky sound is amazing.
If you can’t beat them – join them. There’s no question that the entire world’s military strategists are looking at the rampant use of drone warfare in the Ukraine to see how modern battles will be fought.
While casual observers see the switch to low cost drones as a eyebrow raising development – military experts realize it’s a radical re-thinking of a modern battlefield. One in which the large, powerful fighting tools of the past are quickly becoming nothing more than expensive, defenseless targets.
Just like we’re seeing in the Ukraine, instead of wanting a force of slow-moving tanks or a fleet of big fighting and support vessels, you can do a lot more with a ton of unmanned attack drones. It’s the difference between 3 big guys in a bar against 1000 little guys. The tactics of a small, expendable swarm can often overwhelm even the best defended capital ship by sheer numbers. We’re already seeing swarm technology being used to blanket an area. Ukrainian forces have driven a truck full of 117 drones, let them loose, and took out a up to 40 high-end Russian bombers before anyone could react.
Experts have pointed out it would be very easy to develop a system of 100’s of drones that would swarm a building or event with facial detection systems and assassinate key targets – completely autonomously and impervious to even radio jammers. All with off-the shelf parts for a fraction of the cost of normal military equipment. With hundreds of kill bots incoming all at once, it would be hard for any defensive service to protect their key assets from every single one.
The navy is taking note too – with smaller, modular fighting units.
The wish list is now simple: Rear Adm. William Daly, head of the Navy’s surface warfare division, wants to amass a large number of small, modular unmanned boats that can be quickly equip with payloads that fit in common containers and are designed to confuse and swarm the enemy.
The admiral rightly says the new hybrid fleet does not need to include large and/or exquisite un-crewed platforms. He is very clearly saying the old multi-million/billion dollar efforts are a thing of the past. The focus instead is on building lots of these craft very quickly and cheaply.
This isn’t academic, we saw the launch of a Mobile Ship Target (MST) here in Portland this year. It’s designed to mimic the electronic, shape, and other properties/signatures of just about any ship so the Navy can practice using various experimental munitions against it.
It’s a fascinating development – and a somewhat frightening new reality of the kind of drone warfare world we’re entering.
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